Al Pacino may look perfect in the title role, but David Mamet’s 'Phil Spector’
drama for Sky Atlantic tramples all over the truth, argues Mick Brown.

When, in December 2002,I interviewed Phil Spector at his home in Los Angeles, just a few weeks before a fading actress named Lana Clarkson was found shot dead in his hallway, he spoke of his lifelong dream to have his favourite actor, Al Pacino, play him in a film of his life. Spector clearly imagined that this would be a work celebrating his towering musical achievements as the legendary producer of records by The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers and The Beatles. What he could never have imagined is that Pacino would indeed one day play him – but not as the brash, cocksure “Tycoon of Teen”.

In Phil Spector, which was written and directed by the American dramatist David Mamet and will be shown this evening on Sky Atlantic, Pacino portrays a very different Phil Spector – paranoid and beleaguered as he faces a charge of murder.

To refresh your memory: in the early hours of February 3, 2003, Spector was out on a night’s restaurant and bar crawling when he walked into a Hollywood nightclub, the House of the Blues, and met Clarkson, who was working as the club’s VIP hostess. He invited her home to his “Pyrenees castle”, in the working-class suburb of Alhambra. Three hours later, Clarkson died from a gunshot to the mouth.

When the case came to trial in 2007, the prosecution argued that Spector had killed Clarkson in a fit of anger when she wanted to leave. The defence argued that she had taken her own life in a case of “accidental suicide”.

That trial resulted in a hung jury (it was split 10-2 in favour of a conviction). In a second trial, in 2009, Spector, who is now 73, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years’ imprisonment.

Phil Spector is not a courtroom procedural – we barely enter the courtroom at all; rather, it is billed as “an exploration of the client-attorney relationship” between Spector and one of his defence attorneys during the first trial, Linda Kenney Baden, played by Helen Mirren. (Spector’s original lead lawyer, Bruce Cutler, jumped ship halfway through the trial to star in his own “reality” television series.)

Thefilm charts the emotional transition of Kenney Baden, who is initially convinced of Spector’s guilt, but through her encounters with him eventually believes the case against him to be not proved.

Mamet is a dramatist who thrives on conflict, and on provoking his audience. When Phil Spector aired in the United States in March, it achieved the rare feat of offending or upsetting just about everyone.

A group calling itself the Friends of Lana Clarkson decried it as “a love letter to a murderer”. Spector’s 33-year-old wife Rachelle complained that it depicted her husband as “a foul-mouthed megalomaniac”. (To rectify matters, Rachelle, who has pursued a singing career since Spector’s imprisonment, recently released a single, PS I Love You, dedicated to her husband and focusing, she explains, on “the two tragedies” in his life – the suicide of his father, when Spector was nine, and his son Philip Jnr’s death at the age of 10, from leukaemia. The death of Clarkson and her husband’s conviction apparently do not qualify as tragedy: the song, which includes the immortal couplet “He’s my rebel guy/that wouldn’t hurt a fly”, is pure farce.) Critics, meanwhile, have attacked it as “a moral mess”.

“Well first off,” Mamet says, speaking from his home in California, “I don’t give a s---. My life is interesting enough without reading the unlicensed opinions of people.” He says that he knew nothing about Spector, “except that I liked his music very much”, and had paid little attention to the case until 2010, when his agent urged him to watch the BBC documentary The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, made by Vikram Jayanti.

Al Pacino in 'Phil Spector' (Philip Caruso)

The centrepiece of Jayanti’s film is a deeply compelling interview with Spector conducted on the eve of his first trial. News footage from the trial is presented in montage form, as a visual accompaniment to Spector’s music. The documentary does not pretend to be impartial – Jayanti has said that it was his intention to leave the audience with the impression that the case against Spector was not proved.

Watching the documentary, Mamet says he was struck by the possibilities of Spector as “a mythological character: this is a man avowed by all to be a monster. He is the Minotaur”. He was also struck by the challenge “to take an irrefutable proposition – the guy’s obviously guilty – and see if I could refute it”.

So is this fact or fiction? Here’s where the problem starts.

A disclaimer at the beginning of the film states that: “This is a work of fiction. It’s not 'based on a true story’. It is a drama inspired by actual persons in a trial, but it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment on the trial or its outcome.”

This may be a legal necessity, but it is patently untrue. The film is clearly “based on a true story”, and quite obviously sets out to depict actual persons.

“I always say the question is not if something is based on a true story but if it is a true story,” Mamet says in reply. “And the reason it’s not a true story is that that didn’t happen.

“Phil Spector,” he goes on, is “a fiction about what might happen backstage at the defence team if I were the lead defence attorney. I would say, OK, here are the facts, here’s what I think we should do; here’s an alternative version that makes sense to me.”

Well, up to a point. Mamet has drawn on court transcripts for parts of the film, and addresses key pieces of evidence that surfaced in the trial. Kenney Baden herself acted as a consultant.

Seeing the case through her eyes, the film suggests that Spector was not guilty “beyond reasonable doubt”. But in making that case, Mamet ignores the evidence that doesn’t fit his thesis, so that in the end Phil Spector becomes less an “exploration” than an act of advocacy.

When I interviewed Spector in 2002, he struck me as a charming, intelligent, funny but deeply troubled man. He talked at considerable length, and with astonishing candour, about the mental and emotional troubles that had assailed him over the years. He had “devils inside that fight me”, he said, and was “probably relatively insane… I’m my own worst enemy”. But the worst, he said, was behind him. He was trying to be “a reasonable man”. My interview appeared in the Telegraph magazine on February 1, 2003, with the cover-line: “Found: Pop Music’s Lost Genius”. Two days later, Lana Clarkson was dead.

Oddly, this interview finds its way into the film. When Kenney Baden arrives in Los Angeles to join the case, she is greeted by Bruce Cutler (Jeffrey Tambor), brandishing a copy of the magazine.

“Telegraph, London – faxed to Phil on the day of the shooting… Read the article! He’s been cold sober for 10 years. Cold sober. That night, House of Blues and Lana Clarkson. Article sets him off. It sets him off…”

This seems not to have been the case. The Telegraph did indeed dispatch copies of the magazine to Spector, but they did not arrive until after the murder. Nor had he been “cold sober” for 10 years: he had started drinking again two months before Clarkson’s death. It is the least of the distortions of truth that litter the film.

Phil Spector is a masterfully executed piece of drama. The dialogue crackles in vintage Mamet fashion, and the performances are uniformly excellent. In his jittery, trembling demeanour, and his flights of self-aggrandising, wounded rhetoric – “I invented the music business. Where’s the statue of me?” – Pacino seems to be channelling Spector, albeit a Spector possessed of Mamet’s considerable erudition and articulacy.

Throughout his trial, Spector banged the drum that he was on trial not for murder but for being Phil Spector. In emails to friends he depicted himself as a martyr to his genius, variously likening himself to Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter whose career was destroyed in the Fifties by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Albert Einstein, “who had to flee Nazi Germany because his friends called him 'a Jew’”.

Helen Mirren with Al Pacino in 'Phil Spector' (Philip Caruso)

Throughout Mamet’s film, Spector and his defence team rehearse the view that he was railroaded, that his celebrity – and his notoriety – made him the victim of injustice. Meanwhile, the true victim in the case, Clarkson, is given short shrift. “I won’t attack the girl,” Kenney Baden tells Cutler when she agrees to take the case. But that’s exactly what the defence did in the trial, and it’s what Mamet does here. Clarkson is dismissed as fame hungry and “crazy”, reduced to a clip from her showreel (which was shown in the trial) of her “blacked up” to resemble Little Richard. It leaves a sour taste.

Mamet says he approached Spector before making the film. “I got a letter back from his attorney saying, 'Phil thanks you for your interest in the case, but he’s not interested in seeing you.’ I don’t know that it would have helped.”

When I ask how much Kenney Baden contributed to his portrayal of the fictional character that happens to bear her name, he snaps. “I can’t remember. It was two years ago.”

But they discussed the case?

“Absolutely. And there were many things where she said, 'I’m sorry, I just can’t talk about that.’”

Mamet emphasises that “none of the facts in the case have been misrepresented; none of the testimony has been misrepresented”. But what is more telling is what has been omitted, and added.

Time and again, the film returns to the central argument of the defence that had Spector shot Clarkson, blood from the wound would have spurted from her mouth like water from a fireman’s hose, drenching his white jacket. Looking at the apparently pristine garment on display in Mamet’s film, viewers might be incredulous that a jury could ever have found Spector guilty. What the film skips over is the conflicting testimony for the prosecution that the fine misting of blood on Spector’s jacket matched the misting pattern on the hem of her dress, putting Spector at arm’s length from Clarkson when the shot was fired.

“Well…” Mamet says, impatience creeping into his voice. “I’m not making a movie about the prosecution.”

The other critical piece of prosecution evidence was the testimony of his chauffeur, Adriano De Souza, that Spector emerged from his house, gun in hand, and said: “I think I killed somebody.” In court, the defence suggested De Souza had “misheard” Spector’s words.

Mamet introduces a new theory: that De Souza was pressurised into making his statement by corrupt detectives threatening to charge him as an accessory. In fact, De Souza’s account was consistent from the moment he was questioned by the first policeman arriving at the scene.

Perhaps the greatest distortion occurs at the very end of the film. I shan’t spoil it. But suffice to say it involves Spector’s notorious Afro wig.

Does any of this matter? Perhaps not.

As Mamet says, it’s fiction, right? But few people will bother to seek out the truth: the colourful, invented drama becomes the historical version.

“Well in the first place,” Mamet says, “I don’t give a s---. In the second place, I don’t agree with you.

“You’re considering yourself the advocate for people who are dumber, or less informed, than you or I. And I don’t know who those people are. I’ve never met a dumb audience.

“And just as [Spector]’s entitled to a defence, I’m entitled under the First Amendment to write whatever the hell I want, and if someone’s fool enough to put it on television that’s their problem. But the right is moot if there’s going to be some overriding authority that at some point says, 'Aha! But what about x, y and z?’ Well that’s a problem between me and God, you know.

“Do you think [the film] is an immoral act that is going to lead to hordes storming the prison and demanding [Spector’s] release so that he can go out and kill?’

Probably not…

I hear Mamet sigh down the telephone. “Here’s the basic problem. You’re an expert on the case and I’m a hack gag writer.” (I think he was being sarcastic…) “I don’t give a s--- about the facts.”

Mamet seems curiously reluctant to discuss his own opinion on whether or not Spector is innocent.

“It’s nobody’s business [what I think]. That’s what the movie is.”

But in an interview in 2011 he stated, “I don’t think he’s guilty,” adding, “They should never have sent him away. Whether he did it or not we’ll never know, but if he’d just been a regular citizen, they never would have indicted him.”

“Exactly so,” he says now. “I do think there’s reasonable doubt. But that’s very different from saying he was railroaded.”

Mamet could well have written a drama that explored the nature of celebrity, the client-attorney relationship, the mythological resonances of a tortured genius, without basing it on a real case. I wanted to put this point to him. But after 22 minutes, and after I had used the word “dishonest” to describe his film, Mamet – politely but emphatically – terminated the conversation.